Vanderpump Rules Recap: The Kennedy Curse

A grave threat to our nation is on our television screens constantly. He’s a thin-skinned, insecure man who brands his critics as “losers” and comments on the appearance of women when they refuse to sleep with him. He uses “alternative facts” to make him look much more successful than he really is. His detractors, who he clearly sees as enemies, follow him around protesting his every appearance in an attempt to eradicate him from public life.

No, silly, I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about DJ James Kennedy, a man who thinks that everyone is always jealous of his “perfect hair” when his coif is really just a B-minus at best, and that is in 2004, where it came from.

God, James Kennedy annoys me so much, but his craven attempts at validation are so simply pathological that I find them somewhat amusing, particularly because they only affect about half a dozen people in a very select West Hollywood community and have no far-reaching implications, other than possibly inducing mass bouts of nausea among the viewing public. In this episode, we watch him try to incompetently rap, get hypnosis to overcome his problems, and attempt to convince his beauty queen girlfriend that he did not sleep with half the staff of SUR. We all know that it’s a contractual obligation for SUR employees to bed down at least three co-workers, so it’s absolutely true. (I’m trying to get hired just so that manager Peter will be forced to let me rub every part of my body across the stubble on his man chest.)

James’s DJ gig is an absolute disaster because Gigi and Ellie, the two hostesses who slept with him, decide they are going to confront him and his girlfriend with all the evidence they have that he’s a cheat. Scheana decides it would be fun to join them, as does Jax, James’s ex Kristen, and Kristen’s current boyfriend Carter. This is a spectacularly bad and juvenile idea that is absolutely doomed to end in complete chaos. I am all for it.

Naturally, it quickly devolves into the easily provoked James yelling at the girls and sarcastically thanking Jax and Kristen for coming. This leads Jax to throw a drink at James, which gets them both booted out of the clurb. James is probably going to get fired from yet another DJ gig because he is a bad person who always takes the bait. Hmm. Does that sound familiar?

The worst part about James’s storyline this week, however, is his lunch with his mother. First of all, she reinforces his delusion that the people that can’t stand him are “jealous.” I guess when you only have $200 in your checking account, like Katie and Tom, it might be possible to be jealous of a nobody like James, but that’s still not even the case. Secondly, she says the karmic payback Kristen deserves is that she won’t be able to have children. What kind of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome kind of cruelty is that? Oh, this girl was a little bit mean to the barely functioning alcoholic that is your eldest child and so you wish, out loud and with all sincerity, that she end up “barren” because of it? No wonder James turned out to be a mucus bubble on the nostril of Hollywood’s lesser-known nightclubs.

Jax fought with more people than James last night, though. He was also fighting with Brittany and her mom Sherri, a low-key homophobe who once again raised concerns about silly allegations that Jax might have made out with a dude once. At first he responds correctly, saying that he doesn’t have anything against gay people, but he’s not one of them. When Sherri and Brittany press him on the issue, however, he turns into a jerk. By the time he storms out of the apartment, saying that he should tell Sherri everything he’s done to Brittany in the past year to prove he’s not gay, there is no side left to back in this argument.

He returns and Brittany, of course, is mad that they fought in front of her mother. He tells Sherri, “She needs to realize what she’s got. I do so much for her and ask for nothing in return.” Excuse me? This is what Sherri should have said in response: “You need to realize what you have. My daughter does not deserve to be treated like all of those skanks at the roast who you cheated on. You are a petty criminal and a liar. I know that because you just said you’re going to start eating healthy and then pulled a bag of Tostitos out of your grocery bag. What kind of Oprah Winfrey, I-love-bread bullshit diet is that? Now, if you’re going to keep cheating and disrespecting my daughter, who is a much better human being than you are, then I’m giving her my plane ticket back to Kentucky while I stay here and beat your smug, ungrateful ass until you can’t even fit back in your man-boob Spanx.”

The fights between Jax and James and Jax and Brittany are much better than the sort of non-fight between Ariana, a girl who looks and acts like she has owned a horse since the age of eight, and Stassi, a thong with a merkin built into it. Ariana does not like Stassi and is sort of fine with that. Stassi, on the other hand, needs to bend the will of everyone around her, like the light passing through a prism of liberal tears, so she can’t stand it. She needs Ariana to fake kiss her ass or something. While they’re all painting and drinking, Ariana tries to be like, “It’s cool, we can not like each other,” which, I reiterate, is a totally valid way to conduct your life with co-workers or friends of friends. Stassi gets all bent out of shape and her conjoined-mind twin Katie goes along with it, pouting so hard that her nose ring becomes visible and everyone in the painting class vomits in their turpentine.

The only people getting along this episode are Katie and Tom, which is excessively rare. It’s sort of like rain on your wedding day or a free ride when you already paid. This is especially surprising given that they went to go get a prenup. Katie is initially mad because she says that Tom keeps complaining about spending money on the wedding, but he’s shelling out $2,500 for a prenup. That kind of makes sense to me, because it is the only thing that they will buy for their wedding that will actually get used again sometime in the near future. (ZING!)

Seriously, I don’t know what kind of cut-rate law office they go to, but they are sequestered in a wood-paneled room that looks like something a Teamsters union in Teaneck, New Jersey, would reject as being too trashy for their meetings. Then their lawyer comes in and he’s a guy who looks like Harry Dean Stanton dressed up for an audition to play Kurt Cobain at the Shady Pines Senior Center’s production of Courtney Did It: An Original Musical. It turns out that they don’t even have enough money in the bank to buy a curved-screen television. They have no property, no cars, no assets, and absolutely no retirement savings. The only thing the prenup solves is who gets to take care of the dogs in the case of a divorce. This seems like a waste of time, even though I’m always for a prenup in one of these situations, especially for a relationship like Katie and Tom’s, which seems like an anvil poised on the edge of a cliff in a Road Runner cartoon.

Katie got up from the lawyer’s table — she had to run off for a very important bridesmaid planning meeting — Tom lingered for a minute. While the lawyer was jotting on his legal pad, Tom eased back in his chair and spread his legs. “You know, talking about legal issues always gets me a little, well, worked up,” he said. When he knew the lawyer was looking up from his pad, he trailed his hand down his T-shirt and over the growing lump in his tight jeans.

“Yeah, the law is fascinating stuff,” the lawyer said, pushing back his chair and getting ready to rise. “Contracts. Torts. Litigation.” He walked around the table and headed for the door.

Tom put his elbow out, not to forcibly stop him from leaving, but to give him the indication that he might want to say. “Yeah,” Tom said, applying pressure to his crotch with that hand. “I sure do love talking about briefs.” But the lawyer didn’t bite; he headed to the door and mumbled something that sounded like, “Excuse me,” and closed the door silently behind him. Tom let out a sigh and pushed his pelvis toward the ceiling. He grabbed the tab of his belt with one hand, and pulled it taut before it released open. He undid his pants and slid his hand inside his boxers, feeling the initial tingle of self-pleasure wrack his body. “Looks like I’m going to take the law into my own hands,” he said to no one in particular and everyone at once.